A Tribe of the Mid-Euphrates, and the Vagaries of Change

While much attention has been spent on the Shammar tribe recently, because of shaikh Ghazi Al-Yawar’s elevation to the Presidency of Iraq, little has been written on another, equally large and complex tribal confederation, the Muntafiq. The latter inhabited the fertile lands of the classical sawad (the black earth of Mesopotamia), now known as the mid- to lower Euphrates districts. Perhaps to a greater extent than the Shammar in the north of the country, the Muntafiq were a composite of many tribes and sections made up of occupationally diverse, religiously mixed members. The leadership of the Muntafiq was, and still is, vested in the Sadoun family, which is Sunni while the majority of the clan heads and membership are Shi’a. In Iraq, this is par for the course; most of the tribes in the country have similar histories. Moreover, this is also far from being only a tribal feature; in Iraq, for instance, there are some Shi’a shrines that are administered by Sunni superintendents, the one at Samarra being a notable example.

The point here is that, like most social forces, tribes in Iraq are a microcosm of society at large. They are not immune from social pressures nor are they isolated from the changes that restructure the social order. The fact that the tribesmen “belonging” to the Muntafiq tribe are Shiite is not a novelty in Iraq, except to the Americans. And the fact that they converted from Sunnism to Shiism in the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries is well known among historians of Iraq. So why this focus on the “oddity” of the arrangement, especially in Western press reports? This is not to claim that relations were always smooth between the tribesman and his shaikh; there are dozens of stories of Muntafiq sheikhs both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who grabbed tribal lands and recorded them under their own names. But I don’t think there was serious religious friction among the Muntafiq until, of course, Saddam Hussein’s regime began to play up to the Sunni leadership of the mixed tribes in the south, and to attempt to coopt them.

Even then, how Sunni was the Sunni leadership of the Muntafiq? Beyond the Sadoun family, how many clan leaders were Sunnis? As I mentioned in an earlier post, Suq al-Shuyukh, the name of which is translated as the market of the sheikhs, grew out of an encampment to which Muntafiq tribesmen used to repair to buy and sell their wares. Gradually, it became more permanent and grew even further; eventually, it became the “capital” of the Muntafiq tribe. More importantly, Suq al-Shuyukh became a cultural capital for the Shiite tribesmen of the region, ranked, by some accounts, as a close second to the holiest of holies, Najaf. In the early twentieth century, it evolved still further to become the administrative center of one of the large clans that made up the Muntafiq, the Ajwad. The Ajwad made up one of the three ruling tribes of the Muntafiq confederation, and its ruling house was Shiite.

Perhaps it is time for historians of the country, whether Arab or Western, to note an elementary rule, that the social, religious and political map of the Iraqi tribes is always changing. Tribal confederations are, by their very nature, always in flux. Tribal sections break off and join other confederations; the original parent tribe morphs into another; nomads become farmers, livestock traders become shipping magnates, and so on and so forth. For observers of Iraqi tribes to label them ONLY as Sunni or Shiite is to ignore the richness of their history in the country. In fact, its downright ridiculous, especially when identity is so complex, varied and fluctuating. That, after all, is what life is all about, and historians, more so than other professionals, should reflect that.